Couple of questions - thinking of moving to Mac

[strawberrycornetto]

I am getting a new laptop because my existing one has broken. Its under guarantee from John Lewis and after a problem with customer services they have agreed I can get one of equivalent value from their website. I have narrowed my choice down to a sony vaio for 699 or a mac for 799.

I am not overly keen on the idea of a sony because I think you pay extra for the name and I am therefore considering the mac. I LOVE my iphone so would quite like to try out an apple computer. I mainly use computer for internet, photos and itunes, so I would imagine it would be ok for what I need.

My questions are:

will I be able to transfer over my existing files, eg photos, videos and itunes

will I be able to use my existing printer?

anything else I should bear in mind?

Thannks

Sorry, one more question. Will it come with everything I need or will I have to buy more software to go with it?

I have gone Mac in the last 6 months - I don't really see much difference between Mac and PC for the things I do - Internet, Email, photos, i-tunes, except it is much more intuitive and faster.

If you are already iphoned-up, I wouldn't question it. All of the above will be fine.

Will come with operating system, but generally no office etc. but you can you OpenOffice for free on download.

Ok, can't answer everything, but once you go mac you never go back! Brilliant for internet, photos and music, very intuitive, and best of all no viruses!

itunes transfer should be fine, but you can't run ipods/iphones on both a mac and a PC simultaneously, so make sure all your music is in one place so you can copy it into a new itunes library, then you'll have to wipe and reinstall it all on your ipod/iphone - if you leave any music just on your ipod, you'll lose it. Hope that makes sense! If you have a mac shop near you (and lots of patience) you can go in and ask them for help.

photos should be fine - you'll have a photo programme on the mac for opening/basic editing. If you want to do more complex stuff obviously you can buy new software.

Video should be fine, but depends what format it's in - Windows Media Player files (obviously) can be problematic. But there are free download programmes (think ones called Flip4Mac) that will let you play them. Once you have video in your itunes same applies as for music.

Existing printer should be fine if it's reasonably modern. Mac's are pretty 'plug and play' - if you need new drivers you can just google for them, although not all printer models have mac drivers.

If you want to run Office or similar you'll need new software, but the actual files should be transferable between PC and mac.

Help at all?

yes (unless they are in some strange format)
yes (you may not even need to install any new drivers for it)
don't think so

I went from PC to Mac last year and although it's not quite a road to damscus conversion (I don't totally buy into the whole Mac Life concept), for someone like me who uses computers a lot for work but is not particularly technical, then it has been great.

I think you pay extra for either Sony or Mac names - you can potentially get more "bang for your buck" by going for a PC made by HP or Toshiba or something, but for me the improved user experience on the mac (much easier to download/install etc pre installed printer drivers etc, has made life easier.

You should check what software is on it. Macs come with their proprietary iLife software, which includes Mac's mail programme and Safari, which is the Mac internet browser and a chat programme.

If you want word processing etc - the equivalent of MS Office is called iwork and costs around £70, or you can buy MS Office for Mac for around £100.
I had to do the latter, as I share a lot of documents for work, and I wasn't convinced that ilife would be compatible with MS Word, which is the industry standard but I'd say office for mac isn't quite as good as Office for PC (unsurprising, really!)

Meant to say - have a look at the apple website, its quite useful. They do a 30 day free trial of ilife too.

Thanks everyone.

My laptop which has had so many problems is toshiba so I have steered away from another one.

We do have a nearby apple shop, so I might go in and have a chat tomorrow.

...just a few notes about Office for Mac. Or indeed iLife.

Firstly, do you need it?

...if you are only word processing, I'd say not. Download Open Office for zilch, this is entirely compatible with MS Word on PC and Mac, though I have heard mixed reports about its other functions (that I don't use myself, and suspect many folks don't either)

If you decide you do, look at the microsoft education online store, and buy the student and teacher edition (if you are neither of these, find someone who is. Like one of your kids!) This way it costs about £45...

OK a few things....

Firstly you should be able to link an iPod with both a PC and a Mac. Back up the music to be sure but it should still work on two different machines. The key to doing that is to manually manage your music rather than accept the option of auto-syncing the first time you connect the iPod (and that's not just for having a Mac and a PC but a good rule of thumb for if you have two PCs or even two Macs).

If you choose the automatic option then it will keep your iPod in sync with what's on your iTunes. And as your iTunes will be empty on a machine it will think "oh you don't want those songs anymore, I'll delete them from your iPod so that it looks like your iTunes."

iLife comes free with Macs but doesn't include the Mail or Web Browser (Safari) application, you just get that already installed. Rather iLife has the following:
iMovie for making movies
iPhoto for photos
iDvd for making DVDs
Garage Band for making music
iWeb for making web sites

Far from being just for "basic" photo handling and editing I think that iPhoto does the job really well and does everything that I've ever need a photo app to do.

Definitely try the free OpenOffice packages that are around, they should be completely compatible with Intel based Macs.

Sounds good. The ilife stuff sounds fine for me. We used to have open office on our old PC and it was fine for what I need I think. I only really use it for basic stuff. I could always do anything more complicated at work.

What the hell is the point in a Mac back in the day when they where RISC based and only came with OSX they offered something slightly different and the reduced instruction set led to them being better for some things.

Now days with there Intel based chipsets and Windoze option they are simply over priced PCs for elites.

Just get a normal laptop and if you don't like windoze (god knows why anyone would like it) get a nice Linux distro like SUSE or Mandriva or even Ubuntu if you must.

Macs have no place in the world today.

Is that really necessary Ryoko?

All that sort of thing has a habit of doing is to draw out the rabid Mac fans, who in turn will lure in the equally fanatical Windows fans and the whole point of the thread will be lost in the swamp of pointless argument between both sides.

Or maybe I just spend too much time on technical forums where that sort of comment is a red rag to a bull and a sure way of destroying any decent conversation

I still just find it crazy that in 2010 people are still wasting there hard earned on Macs because they don't like Windoze.

It's just about time people realised Macs are PCs, hardware wise they are identical and you can put what ever OS you want on anything.

I went over to the other side in November, love the big screen. Love the whole Mac experience.

However as I wanted to use Word for Windows and Excel in the formats I was used to I downloaded Parallels Desktop and then loaded the Windows OS and my Word and Excel progs onto the Mac.

Hence I have Snowleopard OS and Windows OS on the same machine.

It cost me about sixty quid for the Parallels software but no more as I already had all the other stuff on discs.

I am very pleased with it all.

HTH

If people want Macs because they find them easier to use and that makes their work easier, why criticise it. I'm a Linux user, it suits me and it saves me money, but if a £900 Mac lasts 3 years, it's costing less than £1 per day. That may be good value if it meets your needs.

As for being able to run any operating you system on any hardware, if the OS you want is MacOS then you have to have Apple hardware.

For anyone wanting to run MS Office on a Mac, or even on Linux, another option is WINE and it's commercial equivalent Crossover Office.

I'm just saying people are too quick to jump to buying new machines, MacOS is a version of BSD anyway so people should try other stuff first, before spending a large amount on a silver/white PC.

... and you can get big screens (and use multiple screens) with Windows machines, too.

I have a couple of XP machines with 2 screens each, and once the USB adaptors are cheap will add more screens (USB unit plugs into PC, wireless link to a VGA adaptor in the flat screen display, so easy to add up to 7 extra screens - though may need a 4 GB PC to have sufficient RAM for shared graphics).

I know its not exactly the same as having screens but I still find it funny that Windows has only just introduced something similar to multiple desktops.

I fully expect them to be crowing about the "new" and "innovative" Windows Cube (OpenGL Cube) in around 20 years time .

I don't hold my breath for them ever making the kernal secure tho, I think the security holes are put there to encourage people to upgrade and spend a fortune on anti-virus stuff.

Thought you meant you were thinking of moving to Macclesfield! Locals call it Mac.

"Windows has only just introduced something similar to multiple desktops."

XP has supported it (and that's what, 9 or 10 years old) so long as you have a second graphics card.

There's now an add-on (which appears only to need to be plugged in on a USB cable) which does away with that need, see this 18.5" LCD screen (current cost 75 quid, inc delivery)

(apologies for tangent away from Apple Mac)

(however that screen will work with some Macs too)

The Mac multiple desk top thing isn't the same as having multiple screens connected to a computer.

Rather it's having the ability to flip what your screens(s) are showing easily. So you might flip from a work layout (Spreadsheets, Reports etc and desktop links to various work folders) to a personal layout (Facebook and iTunes with desktop links to your videos) at the touch of a button.

However that capability isn't new on Windows either. I'm pretty sure that there were some extensions released by Microsoft that did exactly that on XP.

The difference is that the Mac way is nice and easy where as to get Windows to do it was rather clunky and involved installing some non-obvious extensions.

Apple are very rarely first to the party, they rarely innovate. However when they do do something they tend to do it very well and in a way that people take to and like.

Microsoft also suffer from somewhat of a lack of focus where various teams of developers do neat things like the multiple desktop feature and yet it's never shouted about and not properly integrated into the Operating System. Apple tend to do a lot less but focus so much better on doing it.